Researchers at the University of Zurich (Switzerland) have developed an artificial intelligence-based pathway to improve personalized care for women who have suffered a heart attack. Accumulating evidence indicates that women who suffer a heart attack have a higher mortality rate than that of …
Researchers at the University of Zurich (Switzerland) have developed a pathway based on iartificial intelligence to improve personalized attention of women who have had a heart attack.
Accumulating evidence suggests that women who suffer a heart attack have a higher mortality rate than men. This has been a reason for concern for cardiologists for decades and has generated controversy in the medical field about the causes and effects of possible gaps in its approach.
First of all, the symptomatology varies, since, unlike men, who usually experience chest pain with radiation in the left arm, a heart attack in women usually manifests as abdominal pain that radiates to the back or as nausea and vomiting. On many occasions, these symptoms are misinterpreted by patients and health personnel, with the corresponding consequences.
In this context, the international research team led by Thomas F. Luscher, professor at the Center for Molecular Cardiology at the University of Zurich (UZH), has further investigated the role of biological sex in heart attacks. “Our study shows that women and men differ significantly in their risk factor profile at hospital admission.”according to the expert.
Certain relevant factors
In the opinion of this team of researchers, differences in age at admission and existing risk factors, such as hypertension and diabetes, are generally not taken into account, which could explain some of the reasons why patients with myocardial infarction have a higher mortality than male patients. “However, when these differences are statistically taken into account, women and men have similar mortality.“, adds the cardiologist.
In this study, published in The Lancet, researchers from Switzerland and the UK analyzed data from 420,781 patients across Europe who had suffered the most common type of heart attack. “The work shows that the established risk models that guide the current management of patients are less precise in women and favor the undertreatment of patients”according to the first author Florian A. Wenzl, from the Center for Molecular Medicine at UZH. “Using a machine learning algorithm and handling the largest datasets in Europe, we were able to develop a novel AI-based risk score that accounts for gender-related differences in the baseline risk profile and improves prediction of mortality in both sexes“, added the expert.
“Our study heralds the era of artificial intelligence in heart attack treatment, “Modern computer algorithms can learn from large data sets to make accurate predictions about the prognosis of individual patients: the key to individualized treatments”Wenzl points out.
The authors see a huge potential in the application of artificial intelligence for the treatment of heart disease in both male and female patients. “Implementing this new score in treatment algorithms will refine current treatment strategies, reduce gender disparities, and ultimately improve survival for both male and female heart attack patients.”Luscher concludes.
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